By Cynthia Rylant
For a child whose cat has died. The comfort here is openly Christian: the cat is in Heaven now, where an angel meets her at the door with a bowl of milk, and God lets her sleep on His bed.
The cat is already dead when the book opens, and it never circles back to how or when. Instead it spends its pages building her a home. An angel meets her at a yellow door, gives her a kiss and a bowl of milk, and lets her in. Inside there's catnip everywhere, kitty toys, buttons to bat around, and trees to climb — and no cat ever gets stuck up a tree here, because when she wants down she just flies. God is in it plainly. The cats sit on His kitchen counter while He washes their bowls, and they sleep on His bed. He walks His garden with a black book and a cat asleep on His head, drawn as an ordinary, kindly man right there on the page. Every so often the cats look down at the houses they used to live in. It rhymes the whole way through, painted in the same bright, flat, childlike colors as 'Dog Heaven,' and you're through it in about four minutes.
The rhyme is what makes this one survivable to read out loud. You can reach the last page without your voice giving out, and that's not a sure thing with some of the other pet-loss books here. It's also specific about cats in a way a grieving child notices — not generic animal happiness but catnip, buttons, a bowl of milk, a warm head to sleep on, the tree problem fixed for good. Your child knew a real cat with real habits, and the book keeps them. What it gives them is somewhere to picture her tonight. Three days in, at bedtime, that helps.